The Rev. William J. Barber II is calling for a moral revival and a new reconstruction.
The North Carolina pastor and activist burst onto the national scene in 2013 when a coalition of faith groups’ weekly protests against voter suppression efforts and other regressive legislation by the state’s legislature got national media attention. Then the president of the state’s NAACP chapter, Barber – with a cohort that started with 17 individuals and grew to the thousands – was regularly arrested fighting the conservative supermajority’s efforts to gerrymander, to cut social services, and to threaten reproductive justice and LGBTQ+ rights.
Prior to that, Barber’s Forward Together Moral Movement expanded voting rights in North Carolina to include same-day registration and early voting, helping bring President Barack Obama to a narrow victory in the state in 2008. In 2017, Barber stepped down from his post as president of the North Carolina branch of the NAACP to revive the Poor People’s Campaign championed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. toward the end of his life.
REVIVAL: 50 years after King's assassination, his Poor People’s Campaign re-emerges
Barber, who will speak in Portland on Nov. 14 as part of the Meyer Memorial Trust Equity Speaker Series, is also the recipient of the 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, or genius grant, and the author or co-author of four books on faith and organizing. He is also a regular contributor to The Nation and a columnist for the National Newspaper Publishers Association. He spoke with Street Roots about the national political scene, the history of the Moral Monday Movement and organizing in the rural south.
Christen McCurdy: On a national level, you’re probably best known for the Moral Mondays protest campaign in North Carolina. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and how and why it started?
William J. Barber II: Our coalition was modeled after what happened in the 1800s right after slavery when black and white people came together to transform the country.
In 2010, we had a legislature that tried to push through voter ID. We were able to stop them because the power of our coalition, (and) a Democratic government – the only one in the South to block voter ID. But what we weren’t able to block was very, very regressive gerrymandering.
It was so regressive that by 2012 and the 2012 election, even though the majority of people of our state voted for progressives, the extremists who called themselves Republicans at the time were able to win supermajorities in the statehouse. With that supermajority, within the 50 days of them being an office, they just denied Medicaid expansion, cut long-term unemployment, cut millions of dollars from public education, went after women, went after the LGBT community, went after the immigrant community, and during the legislative season put a deal on the table titled Senate Bill 666 – and that bill had about 40-some changes to our voting laws.
It was at that point that we in the state decided that we needed to have a deeply moral response. And so in April of that year, we decided that if they were going to crucify everybody, basically, in the state – from the sick to women to the unemployed to low-wage workers – then that crucifixion needs to be exposed to the state. In April, 17 of us went in to the legislative building: seven pastors, people of faith and 10 citizens, one lady in a wheelchair. And we decided to go in on a Monday when the legislature came back in town and to raise our legitimate discontent. They told us that we could not protest in the legislature. We could not even hold placards. We said that we would not allow our First Amendment rights to be taken, and they subsequently arrested us, which was the beginning of the first Moral Monday protests. Those protests continued on through the summer, bringing people together from all parts of the state – every race, every color, every creed, every sexuality – until thousands of people were showing up on Monday. That Moral Monday movement also brought in lawyers who joined in a pro bono way to fight voter-suppression bills that the legislature passed right after the Shelby decision nullified the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By the end of summer, over 1,000 people had been arrested. Tens of thousands had shown up. The Moral Monday movement kept going until 2013, ’14, ’15 and continues in bringing together civil disobedience, litigation and voter registration.
In essence, it was a moral fusion movement rooted in civil disobedience, litigation and voter registration in the South that built one of the deepest coalitions ever been seen in the South of people coming together around a common agenda.
McCurdy: You’ve also revived Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. In the book “Revive Us Again,” you wrote, “The contemporary church has been so accommodative of capitalism that its theology is often viewed as a justification of economic injustice.” What do you think caused that dissonance within the church?
SLIDESHOW: See more photos from the 1968 Poor People's Campaign
Barber: Well, let me just first say that we often say it was Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, but we also need to remember it was the federation of Jewish brothers and sisters, it was the welfare rights workers’ groups, it was Latino groups at the time, and others.
That movement, the Poor People’s Campaign of Dr. King, had deep, broad support. Even as King was losing support among civil rights groups because of his stance against the war, as he was being challenged by the White House, the campaign was really borne out of the people they impacted, poor people all over this country – who Dr. King claimed were the only force that could come together and fundamentally change the country.
It would take bringing together poor white people from Appalachia, along with poor black people from the Delta, and poor Latino people from the borders all coming together to challenge three evils: systemic racism, systemic poverty and militarism.
In the quote in the book “Revive Us Again,” which talks about preaching in the public square, what I mean by that is that too often, what we see is churches and religious bodies, particularly those who cloak themselves under the names like white evangelicalism or Christian nationalism, they just tend to be the chaplain of the state, rather than the critic of the state.
When faith and church becomes merely a place for privatized religion and privatized salvation and privatized relationship with the divine, it is actually counter to Scripture. Jesus said that nations would be judged for how we treat the poor, the sick, the stranger, the immigrants and the least of these. In the Old Testament, the Scriptures declare, like in Isaiah 10, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights.” So whenever religious bodies just go through the motions of internal religiosity, and do not deal with social structures of injustice, then they become accommodating. We’ve seen much of that.
We are seeing now where the president is bringing in a lady by the name of Paula White, who pushes a so-called prosperity gospel that said if you live a certain way, you’ll be wealthy and healthy – who does not follow, in any way, the admonition of Scripture to be critical of the systems of injustice and what causes injustice in our country.
Sometimes we see religion being used where people just sit on the sideline and kind of say, “Everything is going to be all right.” And we forget that it was the religion of abolitionists that led them not to pray against slavery but to stand against slavery. It was the religion of the Social Gospel movement in the late 1800s, early 1900s, that led them not just to pray that people would have living wages, a better job, but to fight for those things as a matter of deep morality.
It was the Civil Rights Movement that said we don’t need to just pray for things to get better in America, we need to march in the street and challenge the injustices of society and declare that segregation was not only a political problem, but a moral problem.
And so anytime when we see millions of people without health care and silence too often by the church, when we see 62 million people without living wages and silence from too many of the churches, we see 140 million people living in poverty, and there not be an outcry from the church, then we actually enable greed by our apathy and absence from the public square.
Where we see churches who say that the moral issue is hate, disliking gay people, standing against a woman’s right to choose, standing up for guns and tax cuts for the wealthy and building a wall to block people from this country, not only are they wrong – because there are more than 2,000 Scriptures in the Bible that speak to how we should treat the poor, the stranger and the least of these – they are what I call majoring in minors, being so loud about what God said so little about and so quiet about what God said so much. They are actually misusing the faith to enable injustice.
We have to have moral movements that will challenge both of these realities within the church, within religious structure, and will stand in the same places that the abolitionists stood, that the Social Gospel movements stood, and that devotees of the civil rights movements stood. We need to stand in those same places today. And more importantly, we need to stand in the tradition of Jesus and in the traditional process and not be the chaplain of the state, but to be the critics of the state, particularly when the state is being unjust toward the least of these.
McCurdy: You were politically active and nationally visible before the 2016 election, which came as a shock to a lot of Americans who I think expected the incumbent party to stay in power in the executive branch. Was that a shock to you?
Barber: Too many people didn’t recognize that Trump was pandering to an audience that had been prepared for years – ever since the emergence of the Southern strategy. The division he was promoting, the distortions basically blaming brown folk and black folk for the problems of white poor people. The trickle-down economics that he was promoting was all a part of the Southern strategy that was developed by people like Strom Thurmond and later perfected by people like Lee Atwater, who used it in the successful campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
In fact, Lee Atwater, in an interview, said that after George Wallace lost, that exposed how many people could be won over by his rhetoric and his political persuasions. He said that after ’64, we couldn’t use the N-word, but we needed to find a politics, and I’m paraphrasing now, that would divide black and white people, particularly black and white poor people. And he said that we learn code words and ways to talk about race without actually using racial language. And he said they started talking about things like forced busing, tax cuts and then adding in, you know, critiques against gay people and a woman’s right to choose. And he said in doing that, they created a very powerful methodology for winning elections.
Trump was the recipient all those years of building division, and then he was a recipient of what David Remnick (editor of The New Yorker magazine) calls a white backlash after the era of the time of President Obama.
During the 2016 election, we were doing a 26-state tour, calling on this nation for a moral revival and saying that we needed to move away from this simple and anemic form of political conversation, which talks about left, right, conservative and liberal – as opposed to talking about right or wrong. We were saying then that we needed to address systemic racism in the debates, that we need to address poverty. And yet we went through 26 debates in the 2016 presidential primary and general election and not one debate on systemic racism, not one debate on where candidates stood on restoration of the Voting Rights Act, not one debate on poverty. And so in the real sense, Donald Trump got a pass.
And Democrats were counting on a blue wall instead of running a national campaign in every state. So they allowed Donald Trump, for instance, to run almost free in the South. And if you think about it, if you just won the Southern states, I think 13 or 14 states, you can pick up 170 electoral votes, which means we only need 99 or 100 from the other 37 states. That’s a fundamental political error.
There was so much dismissal of Trump, and when you combine (that with) the voter suppression, many of us knew that this race would be close and that there were some states that the margin of his victories would come through voter suppression. For instance, he won Wisconsin by 30,000 votes, but 250,000 votes were suppressed in Wisconsin. And then in other places, like Michigan, he won, by 10,000 votes, but 100,000 African Americans alone that were already registered didn’t vote.
America had some real problems that she’s had to face. And as long as she didn’t face them – like poverty – then you leave people open to be fooled and conned by a con man and his enablers.
But we have a politics and a political process that hardly ever deals with those issues. And so it wasn’t so much a surprise. It was a hurtful thing. Which is why we said before the November of that year, we were going to begin the Poor People’s Campaign – a national call for moral revival. Because regardless who won, we still needed to address the issues of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the water economy and the false moral narrative of Christian nationalism.
McCurdy: Trump’s election also almost immediately spurred national, massive protests, the formation of new organizations and the growth of existing organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America. More people are more politically engaged now. What’s changed from your perspective in terms of organizing?
Barber: There’s a negative positive, if you will, that his overtness, brashness, narcissism, racism – right in people’s face – has caused people to want to put him out of office. Now I think that can also be dangerous politically, and it is, and the analysis can be too shallow. Nell Painter at Princeton wrote a piece, and she said we have to remember Trump is the symptom, not the cause. He is what she calls the iconography of a too-often-repeated American reality.
I think that what is positive is to see so many people wanting to be active and get involved and recognizing that we can’t sit home anymore and be unengaged. One hundred million people sat home in the last election, some stats say. Trump loses about 3 to 5 million votes in the popular vote and Trump becomes the president because of an antiquated electoral college. That’s troubling to Americans, that 45 million people vote against someone, and they lose, and yet they become president of the United States. So in some ways, it is good to see people engaging.
But we also have to be careful to think it is just about Trump. Trump couldn’t do a thing without his enablers in Congress. Sen. (Mitch) McConnell and Rep. (Kevin) McCarthy are as dangerous as Trump because they may not say the words he said – and in some ways, his words and rhetoric may be a distraction while they do things like health care and block living wages and stack the federal court with regressive judges and block restoration of the Voting Rights Act. And so what I hope is different and what we’re trying to show in the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is that we need a new political calculus. And people are starting to be open to that.
In every state that Trump won, one of these enablers won, like McConnell. In every state, the margin of victory can be overcome by mobilizing, politicizing poor and low-wealth people.
DIRECTOR'S DESK: Finding our moral power to put people in poverty front and center
McCurdy: Your campaign is broad based and focused on a handful of issues that have already named systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and religious nationalism. And all those issues are connected, but they can also feel overwhelming. And each of them can feel kind of overwhelming to contemplate on its own. How do you stay focused, and how do you avoid falling into despair?
Barber: Three things. No. 1, we don’t see them all on their own. We see them within the context of fusion. That’s one of the things that causes a lot of people to feel despair is they see their issues in a silo rather than seeing how they interconnect. If you see how they interconnect, then you actually also see how you can feel a broader based coalition to address them because people are not addressing the issues in their own small space. To see the interlock in justices is, in fact, to increase the number of people who will engage to challenge them, which in itself brings a sort of hope, because you don’t feel so isolated and alone.
Secondly, one of the things that keeps you from despair is knowing history – that people have faced worse times than what we’re facing now: slavery, women didn’t have the right to vote, entrenchments of poverty that were far worse, but we didn’t even have certain fundamental labor protections. So your hope has to grow out of looking at what they faced and what they overcame and then saying if they could overcome that, then it is simply our time to stand up in this moment and challenge the regressive realities of our day.
And then the third and probably the most important thing that keeps you hope-filled is when you build a movement, like the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, that movement is not built upon people who simply speak on the behalf of poor and impacted people. It is built on the strength and the foundations of impacted people. And when you see people like I’ve seen in the deep South – a mother whose child died because that state didn’t expand Medicaid, and instead of crawling in the corner and hiding, she’s now organized, and the brain keeps together to fight for health care – if she’s fighting, after all of her loss, then it inspires the rest of us.
When I meet a young man who is basically working poverty wages and he said, “We have nothing, nothing else. Our backs are against the wall, and we have nothing else to do but to push. We cannot be silent anymore.” When people like that are standing up, it is hard for us to wallow in despair, to sit down. And we have thousands of those stories of people who are coming together, who are saying we cannot be silent anymore and we won’t be silent anymore. And that’s the power of this movement.
I guess, you know, I would say there’s a fourth component to that, and, of course, that is my own faith tradition. There are many faith traditions. But I am taught that you don’t go around despair; you go through despair. As Dr. King said, you hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. And you don’t go around Calvary and crucifixion. You go through it. And so one of the things that keeps us hopeful is to know that when you are standing up against injustice, when you are criticized for caring for standing with the poor, then you’re actually standing on sacred and holy ground. And on that sacred and holy ground, my faith tradition is that we have resources of the spirit that can steady us and shore us up even in the most desperate situations.